


The Impossible Insertion - The Untold Truth between Chapters 13 and 14

by ArtOfTheTaco



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: Gen, Humor, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22566811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtOfTheTaco/pseuds/ArtOfTheTaco
Summary: This is an attempt to insert a side story into the middle of Hitchhiker's Guide without any of the characters knowing it, without visibly breaking canon. The idea was born from a stupid shower thought of "what would happen if you input a probability of zero into the Infinite Improbability Drive". A stupid question deserves a stupid answer, which I've tried to provide while honoring the style and humor of Douglas Adams. This story insertion involves all the main HGTTG characters, without impacting the book whatsoever (in other words, no shipping, not hot steamy space sex, just good old stupid quirky silliness). Between chapters 13 and 14 seemed like the best place to do this. And don't worry, there is absolutely no need to know what happened at this point in the story, it is (hopefully) all explained in this short read.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	The Impossible Insertion - The Untold Truth between Chapters 13 and 14

Everything you are about to be told is completely, irrefutably, undeniably impossible. That being said, everything you are about to be told is completely true, even if it is most definitely  refutable and deniable, due in no small part to the laws of physics. The events described herein occurred in the middle of a story you already know, as they take place neatly between Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 of the 1979 Earth classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, completely unnoticed to all involved. 

This is not to be confused with the wholly remarkable book titled “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” published by Megadodo Publications on Ursa Minor Beta, which is introduced by the character Ford Prefect in the 1979 Earth classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Why did Megadodo decide to name their book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, knowing the confusion it would cause? This is a question with an impossible to find answer. Or at the very least, an answer which is extremely improbable to find.

* * *

Those who know the story well may be surprised to learn that the events described in Chapters 1 through 13 were leading to a very sudden and tragic end. This was most likely cut from the published edition for a few potential reasons. The late great Douglas Adams may have elected to cut out the several billion years of history between Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 for time considerations, or he may have decided that ignoring these events improved the artistic flow of his narrative by removing the jarring transition associated with the death of every character he had carefully introduced thus far. Or perhaps he concluded that including this deleted portion of the story, regardless of the truth it contains, would only be enjoyed by the small percentage of readers, those who enjoy extremely pedantic and pointless storytelling.

For those who know the story of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but have yet to memorize the story in a chapter-by-chapter manner, a brief refresher. A human, Arthur Dent, and his non-human friend, Ford Prefect, found themselves floating in the vacuum of space after barely escaping planet Earth, which had recently been destroyed by the same alien race who had left them for dead floating in the vacuum of space. 

Meanwhile, across the galaxy, the Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, a depressed robot named Marvin, and Trillian, the other surviving member of the human race, who had met Arthur at a party several months ago, were stealing the Heart of Gold. This state of the art spacecraft was equipped with a remarkable new form of travel which allowed for skipping across the universe in an instant “without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.”

This engine, called the Infinite Improbability drive, functions using a key principle of physics called quantum indeterminacy. In simple terms, this means that for any subatomic particle, it’s completely possible that it  could  instantly disappear and reappear anywhere in the universe, but it’s  most probably going to keep existing right where it is. Or right where it  probably is, to be more accurate. The probability is very small that a particle will cease to exist in one part of the galaxy just to instantly begin existing in another part of the galaxy, but the probability is never zero. 

The probability is even smaller that an entire spaceship’s worth of particles will perform this trick of nature all at the same time, and that all these particles will reappear in the same location relative to each such that the molecular structure of the spaceship as a whole is maintained. Smaller by a very large margin. But alas, it is still not zero. And if this unimaginably small probability is determined, and this number is fed into the Infinite Improbability drive, the ship will instantly cease existing where it is, and start existing in this other location, without breaking a single known law of physics.

As Arthur and his alien friend floated through the vacuum of space, the Heart of Gold ceased to exist across the galaxy, and began to exist in the immediate area around their floating bodies, preventing the immediate death of two major characters, conveniently allowing the story to continue. 

According to Ford’s  Guide, the odds of an abandoned space hitchhiker being picked up by a ship in the brief window between being ‘released into space’ and being ‘dead in space’ were one in  two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine . Furthermore, consider the extreme unlikelihood that the these digits - 276709 - also composed the phone number for the now-destroyed flat where Arthur had met Trillian several months before. The total improbability of these combined events equalled the value which had been entered into the drive to transport the ship across the galaxy,  one in two to the power of infinity minus one .

This is where we find the events at the end of Chapter 13.

After the characters meet and begin to realize the record setting levels of coincidence which brought them together, Zaphod looks at Ford, Arthur, and Trillain. “Trillian,” he said, “is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Improbability Drive?”

“Very probably, I’m afraid,” she said.

* * *

It is a common reaction after being teleported across the galaxy using the Improbability Drive for one to wonder “what would happen if I input zero.” But few who have ever piloted an Infinite Improbability Drive are bold enough or stupid enough to actually try it. But, then again, few are as bold or as stupid as those we tend to elect as our Presidents, Galactic or otherwise. And no one ever elected President had been as bold or as stupid as Zaphod Beeblebrox. At least not at this point in the story, which was, after all, originally published in 1979.

“I wonder what would happen if I input zero?” said Zaphod as he reached an arm for the computer.

Trillian looked up at him and replied “Don’t be stupid.” 

For the tiniest fraction of a second, she considered acting on an impulse to slap his hand away, but she didn’t really believe he would try such a thing. After all, Trillian was a human being, and it was human nature to relax around Zaphod, whom she had spent several months traveling the galaxy with. Zaphod, who had only  once  caused all of the atoms in her body to disappear, and even in that case, they had all reappeared somewhere else completely intact. Even so, the impulse to do something to stop him was there, yet it was not overwhelming. 

If quantum uncertainty would have caused one electron in one atom in one neuron in one of her neural pathways in her brain to shift to the left a few quintillionths of a meter, instead of to the right a few quintillionths of a meter, a chain reaction of differences may have resulted in the neuron firing instead of not firing, which may have triggered another chain reaction of nerve cells which may have resulted in her brain raising her hand to slap away Zaphods hand.

But the electron went right instead of left, the neuron sat quietly, and Trillian’s hands sat motionless. Moments later, the Heart of Gold reached infinite improbability, passing through every particle in the universe all at once, including the right leaning electron in Trillain’s brain which could have stopped it all.

* * *

In the fields of Quantum Indeterminacy and Improbability Drive Physics, it is well understood that a particle appearing across the universe is exceedingly unlikely. It’s trillions of orders of magnitude less likely that two particles will appear across the universe in the exact same location. Extrapolating on this idea, the least likely event which could be possible would be for every single particle in the universe to vanish, then instantly appear across the universe, all in the exact same spot. 

Every particle from every planet, star, and rock. Every photon, neutrino, and quark. Every scrap of matter, anti-matter, and dark matter. Every pulse of regular energy, every cloud of chakra energy, and even every globule of the still undiscovered  periwinkle energy. All of it shifted instantly to a single point in the formerly multi-dimensional fabric known as spacetime.

Of course this exhaustive catalog of things included Arthur, Zaphod, Trillain, Ford, Marvin, and every other living creature in the universe. Luckily, this occurred too quickly for anyone to feel anything or even know it happened. Except for Marvin. His incredible mind worked just fast enough to output one final emotion, a deeply satisfying moment of near perfect comfort and satisfaction that space and time had at long last come to a violent end.

And at this moment, if one can refer to the end of time as  a moment , the quirky story of Arthur and his traveling companions came to an abrupt end. Every character gone, every set piece in this odd little universe obliterated. 

* * *

Fortunately for those who may be interested in a story longer than thirteen and a half chapters, or for those who really enjoyed the second half of the 1979 classic, in the last several decades scientists have created and improved models which may help explain at least some of what happened in the next few moments, or perhaps these should be called the  first  few moments .

The Big Bang wasn’t really big, nor was it a bang. These terms imply size and sound in a universe where neither of these terms has even started to make sense. But the term isn’t important when discussing the point where both space and time suddenly gained some quantifiable level of dimensionality, where there was none before. Before this moment, modern science can only extrapolate past the breaking point of physics and assume that everything in the universe was crammed somehow into an infinitely small speck of nothingness. What is agreed upon is that a period of rapid inflation occurred soon after, providing the new universe some much needed elbow room. 

Eventually, the canvas of reality in this newly expanded spacetime cooled enough to allow subatomic particles to form, some of which shyly paired up to form the first atoms. Millions of years later, some of these atoms collapsed under the force of gravity to form the first stars, resulting in heated gasses burning with the power of nuclear fusion, making bigger atoms. In some cases, these stars exploded so violently that the force not only created even bigger atoms, but sprayed these newly birthed particles far and wide across the galaxy.

Several billion years later, an unremarkable star formed in a completely unremarkable corner of the universe. Soon after, planets formed out of the swirling pools of dust created by the death rattles of long dead ancestral stars. On one of these planets, ideal chemical and thermodynamic conditions, combined with hundreds of millions of years of trial and error, resulted in the formation of complex molecules, some of which bonded together in increasingly complex self-replicating chains . And finally, much to their collective delight, a species of hairless primates called humans came along a few billion years later, called the place Earth, and convinced themselves that all of this was just for them. 

The humans were not the brightest species in the universe, but they did eventually figure out how to escape their planet’s gravity after many more eons of trial and error. They even sent exploration probes to all of the planets they shared a star with. And yet all this time, they never once came to an agreement about how many planets this star system actually contained.

One day a human child was born in an area of this planet they called England, and his parents named him Arthur Dent. When Arthur was a young man, Earth was destroyed by an interstellar construction crew building a hyperspatial express route. Through a series of unlikely events, Arthur found himself floating in space with an alien friend, then being suddenly surprised to find himself alive, filling his lungs with air aboard a spaceship named the Heart of Gold.

* * *

Up to this point, the new universe we have been discussing has been completely identical to the one we all know and love as Chapters 1-13 of  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . However, this is not that universe. In fanfiction terms, this would be known as an  Alternate Universe , although up until now, absolutely nothing has changed. 

Every molecule, every photon, every seemingly random unobservable Heisenbergian property of the quantum scale, identical in every way. By all rational thinking, this alone should be completely impossible, but predicting results from the Improbability Drive using rational thinking often leads to erroneous conclusions. 

Some philosophers would argue that if Universe B emerges from the collapse of Universe A, the conclusion that Universe B and Universe A are identical is the only reasonable expectation. If they both started with a singularity, the starting points must be identical, since how could two singularities possibly differ in any way when their infinite density allows no space or time which could differ between the two? And if the laws of physics are universal, even in two different universes, how could a singularity expanding based on these laws possibly result in any difference between Universes A and B? 

Alternatively, if the laws of physics are only universal within a universe, but are not universal between universes, one would expect vastly different results. Perhaps atoms would never form at all, or stars, or life. 

Surely, one could argue, the creation of Universe B which is  exactly  the same as Universe A  isn’t completely impossible. Nor is a Universe B which is completely different from Universe A. The difference all depends on how physics is maintained, and it’s possible that even the consistency of physics isn’t even consistently applied in such cases. 

What would be completely impossible, most deep thinking physicists agree, is if Universe B was  almost identical to Universe A. A Universe B where everything was exactly the same as Universe A except one single seemingly minor difference. For example, if every particle, every wave, every quantum string behaved exactly the same for billion and billions of years, then one day a random quantum fluctuation in a single electron caused it to shift a few quintillionths of a meter to the left, where in the original universe this same particle had shifted a few quintillionths of a meter to the right. This outlandish scenario has absolutely no possibility of ever happening. In other words, the probability of such an occurrence is not almost zero, it is exactly  zero .

* * *

Approximately 13.8 billion years after the original Zaphod entered zero into the Infinite Improbability drive (ignoring the time in this timeline between the Original Universe and the Alternate Universe when time ceased to exist), an exact duplicate of Zaphod stands aboard an exact duplicate of the Heart of Gold which had just appeared in space around exact duplicates of Arthur and Ford. They hold an exact duplicate of the conversation regarding the maddening improbability of their meeting, during which Zaphod asks Trillian “is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Improbability Drive?”

“Very probably, I’m afraid,” she said.

“I wonder what would happen if I input zero?” said Zaphod as he reached an arm for the computer.

Trillian looked up at him and replied “Don’t be stupid”, and she instinctively slapped his hand away from the drive. For reasons he did not fully understand, Marvin the robot let out a long exasperated moan.

Soon after, the Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Her crew blissfully unaware that they were no longer living duplicate lives of a universe long past, but were instead forging a new untold story all their own, all thanks to a minor quantum fluctuation. 

Their story, as some may know, is documented in the 1979 Earth classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, beginning in Chapter 14. 


End file.
